Social Games for Children who have PDD

According to the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-IV; 1990), Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD) include disorders that present six or more of the 12 symptoms defined for PDD, like autism and asperger's syndrome. Children with PDD have problems adjusting to society. They display difficulties in showing and communicating emotions and feelings, they lack empathy, they don't know how to use proper language and behavior in context and they don't understand or express non-verbal language.

Group Games

• Children with PDD have difficulties interacting socially. They are solitary children and they don't take initiatives. They work better alone and they don't like to exchange ideas with their peers. A way of making them interact is to give them a task that requires other students' help to complete. For example, group the child with PDD with other children and give each member of the group one clue to build a structure or solve a problem. Thus, they need to communicate to one another to finish the work or find the solution.

Social Stories

• Social stories present rules and expected behaviors in simple words and with clear instructions. They use the first-person narrative to help the child identify with the story. A social story has four stages--the first describes the characters, where they are, what they are doing and why. The second deals with the reactions of the other students toward the child's behavior. The third tells the child what to do and the last one, often optional, requires the child to write down sentences about the story to reinforce the expected behavior.

Play Dates

• This planned interaction with other children must be discussed beforehand with the child with PDD to let him know exactly what behavior is expected from him. Usually, for the first play date one playmate is enough. As children with PDD learn by imitating others, a play date is an opportunity for him to watch and imitate the other child's playing, thus developing his social skills and his relationship with the other child. The social skills that still need improvement must be discussed with him and reinforced during the next play date.

Emotion Games

• Another way to help children with PDD understand and recognize emotions is by playing short movies with people displaying emotions like sadness, happiness or anger. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Center at Cambridge University in London, UK, developed a DVD game that has great results with children with PDD. Because children with PDD find it difficult to understand other human beings but are interested in inanimate objects, Baron-Cohen used animated vehicles with actual people's faces on them, unlike in the series about Thomas the Tank Engine, where the faces are drawn.